Internet Archive has changed the names of the Open Source Audio, Open Source Books, and Open Source Movies collections. We have chosen to replace the term “Open Source” with “Community,” because we feel it better reflects the purpose of these collections and the people who donated the content.

28 Responses to Community: A New Name for “Open Source” Collections

The audio clip, on the search for Sly Stone, cuts off during the song Sex Machine. Can you please address this problem. I would love to be able to hear the rest of the inteview with Mr. Wilem…somebody. Thank you

so using open licenses like cc no longer matters, or is that going to be somehow associated with “community” through a series of promotions?

“open source” is a debatably problematic term because it can be vague in practice, but choosing an even more vague term is not a step forwards for the “community” that wants to share and collaborate on works.

Indeed, “community media” is vague and has a social-political connotation, whatever it may be. “Open source” and “community” are not interchangeable without further specification. Maybe for some time it may inspire patrons to be more “social” when sharing something with “a”/”the” “community”, to work more on their “virtual image”, but I doubt that the content will improve; it will just worsen and be 99% hollow and kindergarten-style like Facebook and Myspace.

I think that an intermediate term between “open source media” (“the bio-seed”) and “community media” (“the bio-land”) would be better. A term that supports slightly the holistic approach without speaking out in words the implicit social.

How does one find the file of books on hand and access the book that interests them? There is to much visual distraction that I find it impossible to go to the part of the library that interest me. This is not a sensible way to run a library, because it is not user friendly.
Thank you, Leana